Sunday, August 12, 2012

STATION IDENT 081212

The true alien recedes interminably even as it surrounds us completely. It is not hidden in the darkness of the outer cosmos or in the deep-sea shelf but in plain sight, everywhere, in everything. Mountain summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters and buckshot, micro-processors and ROM chips can no more communicate with us and one another than can Rescher’s extraterrestrial. It is an instructive and humbling sign.

Speculative realism really does require speculation: benighted meandering in an exotic world of utterly incomprehensible objects. As philosophers, our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger.

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Stalkbox

Introduction of Sorts

I have had many names, in different times and places. They're not hard to discover; look in the Stalkbox if you're curious.

For the past year, I've been writing a novel in public. And I've finished!

You can read it, if you want, using the Archive widget below. You don't necessarily have to read it in order, but it begins on Leap Day of 2012 and moves forward from there. It ends in March 2013.

I really enjoyed that process; I might do it again, as soon as I've finished off a couple of smaller projects that are coming due. I do intend to do a revision pass and edit this into something more manuscript-like in the very near future. But for now I'm leaving this first draft up as it is, for people to enjoy, and for me to remember how it began.

For now, I'll place the occasional thought or musing here once or twice a week, just to keep the cobwebs from gathering.

In the bar below, you can click on the RSS symbol to add this blog to your feeds, or click on Message in a Bottle to receive an email version, if that works better for you. If there's a blog tool that you think should be down there, by all means let me know.

Thanks for visiting this place, outside of the other places. Spend as much time as you like. We'll see you again... won't we?